Read Your Best Health by Friday's Intro and Chapter One:
Introduction
This book is written for people who think their best years are behind them, like I once did. If you’ve struggled your whole life to overcome your past, if you’re chronically stressed, if you’ve let anxiety and depression make your world small, if you’ve suffered from poor health or chronic illness, it’s not too late to rebuild your health. I’ve done it, and maybe if you try some of what I’ve tried you could have the same healing too.
I set out to learn how to be braver for my children’s sake, but what I discovered was that learning freedom from fear of my emotions freed my spiritual side. This in turn led to freedom from my thoughts, which then led to freedom from my physical illness. I’ve tried to organize my process into lessons in the hope that others who might like a shortcut may follow. As always, it’s always entirely up to you what your life journey is about.
It seems to me that when we don’t listen to what our body needs and what our life’s purpose is, it leads to our getting sick. We can develop lasting beliefs about ourselves from our childhoods which live on as unconscious programming and run counter to our optimal health. I believe the body heals itself when we examine and release these old holdings and start living with integrity towards our needs and life’s purpose. Many of us live a life so tied to the mind that we have very little opportunity for emotional, physical or spiritual development. It’s possible to get a taste of what others experience in these other areas—-and by so doing increase our sense of happiness and fulfillment—-while remaining true to our core sense of self and beliefs. I’ll show you how I’ve made my life happier and healthier than ever before thanks to examining the mind.
I tried living a small, sheltered life to avoid my anxieties but they found me anyway. Chronic illness—fibromyalgia—found me too. I’m just an everyday person who wouldn’t give up trying to heal myself. I’ve also learned the hard way how to rebound and rebuild, as well as the commonalities to all sorts of illnesses, so you don’t have to waste another day to doing what seems like your lot in life. Start turning your life around with these fixes. I’m going to simply explain some things so that you may understand what got us into this mess. Then I’ll divide the information into five lessons—which I’ve listed under the five days of the week—and how to learn them. Once you understand the lessons, you can check in anytime you want to make sure you’ve incorporated them into your daily life, and if you haven’t, reset your intentions.
I’ll offer suggestions for things you can do to help yourself. If you’re mostly healthy, keep things simple and try the easiest version. If you’re sick, you might want to go deeper. Dip a toe in—and please don’t try to make too many changes at once. These are all things I learned over the course of the past 10 years. If I’d done them all at once, I’d have fried my circuit board.
The lessons:
Monday Reduce Stress, Increase Flow
Tuesday Understand Pain
Wednesday Stop Reliving Emotions
Thursday Develop Parasympathetic Breathing, Vision, Exercise and Thinking
Friday Improve Digestion and Nutrient Absorption
If you are anxious, depressed or chronically ill, please don’t be discouraged about where you are; learn to be encouraged about where you are going. The power of intention is very strong. You may open a book like this and think that you have no hope of changing. Your thought creates an intention that you will not change, though, so try to be open to change; at a minimum, try to reserve your opinion. Thinking is so often judging and judging is so often negative. It holds us captive. To change this, whenever I catch myself judging, I imagine a green heart outline around the thing or person that I’ve harmed through my thoughts so I can see them in a kinder way.
If you find yourself impatient, anxious or blue, remember that this is a sign that your left brain is kicking in. It’s a sign that you’ve got an expectation-—because it is only with expectation and judgment that we or others in our life fall short. It’s never okay to accept an abusive situation, but as long as I know I am safe and loved, I find it helpful to learn to accept what is—-and find the love for what is through my struggles and doubts. I walk in nature or use a diluted essential oil like pine or eucalyptus to bring me back to expansion, hope and mental calm. I often meditate at these times. Prayer works well, if you are open to it. Feel yourself letting stress melt away. Then loop back to the beginning, to the intention of where you’re going. However much you’ve strayed from the path, accept what is. Think kind and loving thoughts about yourself for trying. You’ll grow your ability to stay on the path by checking in with intention frequently. Always remember though, that this is a journey. We aren’t expected to be perfect, just that we try to make progress.
I was, am, and expect to be challenged every day of my life for as long as I am growing. I choose to grow despite the fear of pushing through. This is because I’ve learned that if I give up, disease, pain, despair and hopelessness await. I’ve been there and I don’t want to go back. Now my destination is health, well-being, happiness, expansion and joy.
I hope that seeing what has worked for me can help you have your best health and happiest life yet.
Love,
Elizabeth
Chapter 1
How Chronic Stress Kills
Outer Chronic Stress
We likely think of stress as being a bad thing and that chronic stress is even worse. Stress is any situation that motivates us to act or change, and as such, it can be neutral, good or bad. Hunger is an example of a stress and feeding ourselves the right amount of healthy food is a good outcome.
Outer chronic stress is when we have the motivation to act or change our environment but for some reason we feel unable to do so; whether it is because of external conditions in our lives, like being repressed in some way during our childhood years, or needing to keep our job in order to pay our mortgage.
Inner Chronic Stress
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves with negative self-talk and how we think about ourselves. This is inner chronic stress. Inner chronic stress can be the most insidious because we often believe that without constantly pushing ourselves we will be lazy or useless and amount to nothing. So many of us have a streak of perfectionism that constantly beats up our inner child; our unconscious self.
We harangue and berate ourselves at times in order to win the love and approval of our parents, teachers and friends, and it can become a habit because it seems to have worked in the past. Because it is self-generated, it is easily turned around, however we have to learn to listen to how we speak to ourselves:
“I’m such an idiot!”
“Dad was right; I’m a failure”
“I’ll never lose this weight!”
I believe that we need to understand that most children are born eager to please. If children are given love and positive encouragement along with tools to help with self-discovery and personal growth, they will develop a balance between being true to themselves and their calling, and will also find joy in making others happy.
Children are often taught more by the unconscious teachings of the adults in their lives through nonverbal communications rather than by the verbal. It's said that the majority of communication happens nonverbally. As parents we are often unaware of what we “say” nonverbally. The emotional stress that we feel when our children are up all night with a fever, and then bounce back, while we suffer from lack of sleep, can result in overreaction to our children’s behavior.
Even if we do not overreact visibly, the stress we feel is in our brain state. This helps explain why our kids often start to act out when we are having a bad day. In addition to biochemical cues, I believe they are reacting to the painful feelings from their mirror neurons caused by our own emotional state, and they do not know what to do about it.
Similarly, I think we react to our children’s distress, anger and fear because it is generated within our mirror neurons when we see it in them. How nice it would be to have the skills to reset our emotional state so we do not have to keep reacting to each other in a negative way when we are having a bad day.
Our Unconscious Mind Runs the Show Under our Noses
Our unconscious beliefs are not easy to access but they drive most of our behavior. Most of those patterns and beliefs were formed before we were six-years-old, according to molecular biologists such as Dr. Bruce Lipton of Stanford. I don’t know about you, but I am uncomfortable at the thought that most of my behavior is being run by that childhood self of mine.
Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Test
I first heard about the ACE test in 2015 from an NPR piece. For those who haven’t heard of it, doctors have realized that traumatic events from our childhood increase risk factors for poor health in later life. Things like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction impact us long after our childhoods are over. The likelihood of our having problems with issues as diverse as smoking, drug and alcohol abuse, missing work, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, suicide attempts, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder) and broken bones increases based on how traumatic our childhoods were. As Donna Jackson Nakazawa reports in Childhood Disrupted, “chronic stress leads to dysregulation of our stress hormones, which leads to unregulated inflammation. And inflammation translates into symptoms and disease.” Many other factors go into whether or not we will get sick, but the right hemisphere of the brain doesn’t have a sense of time. Until the emotions from these traumatic events are processed and released, they are stored in our body and we will continue to suffer. I’ve included the ACE test in the back of this book in Appendix I. In addition to answering these questions for yourself, I suggest you think about how your parents would answer these questions, and your grandparents too. Based on recent research reports, I think it has a bearing that I’ll go into later in the book. It’s clear that what we don’t face from our childhoods is contributing to us getting sick, which gave me a great deal of motivation to look back at my early years.
Why I Needed Healing
I was born into a military family during the Vietnam War, while my dad was on active duty in Vietnam. His combat stress translated into PTSD for me. It doesn’t take much to put babies into a freeze state that is easily re-triggered. My unconscious patterns brought nothing but increasing amounts of fear, restriction, isolation, and ultimately pain from Fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia feels like an overloaded circuit board that is about to ignite. To give an example, if my body were a house, it’d be a house with all the lights on, all the appliances running, everything churning, grinding and wearing out. I needed to find help. I had been frozen in a state of chronic stress for over 40 years and I was about to discover the consequences. I needed answers before it was too late.
Medication gave me too many side effects to deal with. I needed to find the root of my problems so I could heal.
You can order Your Best Health by Friday here:
Introduction
This book is written for people who think their best years are behind them, like I once did. If you’ve struggled your whole life to overcome your past, if you’re chronically stressed, if you’ve let anxiety and depression make your world small, if you’ve suffered from poor health or chronic illness, it’s not too late to rebuild your health. I’ve done it, and maybe if you try some of what I’ve tried you could have the same healing too.
I set out to learn how to be braver for my children’s sake, but what I discovered was that learning freedom from fear of my emotions freed my spiritual side. This in turn led to freedom from my thoughts, which then led to freedom from my physical illness. I’ve tried to organize my process into lessons in the hope that others who might like a shortcut may follow. As always, it’s always entirely up to you what your life journey is about.
It seems to me that when we don’t listen to what our body needs and what our life’s purpose is, it leads to our getting sick. We can develop lasting beliefs about ourselves from our childhoods which live on as unconscious programming and run counter to our optimal health. I believe the body heals itself when we examine and release these old holdings and start living with integrity towards our needs and life’s purpose. Many of us live a life so tied to the mind that we have very little opportunity for emotional, physical or spiritual development. It’s possible to get a taste of what others experience in these other areas—-and by so doing increase our sense of happiness and fulfillment—-while remaining true to our core sense of self and beliefs. I’ll show you how I’ve made my life happier and healthier than ever before thanks to examining the mind.
I tried living a small, sheltered life to avoid my anxieties but they found me anyway. Chronic illness—fibromyalgia—found me too. I’m just an everyday person who wouldn’t give up trying to heal myself. I’ve also learned the hard way how to rebound and rebuild, as well as the commonalities to all sorts of illnesses, so you don’t have to waste another day to doing what seems like your lot in life. Start turning your life around with these fixes. I’m going to simply explain some things so that you may understand what got us into this mess. Then I’ll divide the information into five lessons—which I’ve listed under the five days of the week—and how to learn them. Once you understand the lessons, you can check in anytime you want to make sure you’ve incorporated them into your daily life, and if you haven’t, reset your intentions.
I’ll offer suggestions for things you can do to help yourself. If you’re mostly healthy, keep things simple and try the easiest version. If you’re sick, you might want to go deeper. Dip a toe in—and please don’t try to make too many changes at once. These are all things I learned over the course of the past 10 years. If I’d done them all at once, I’d have fried my circuit board.
The lessons:
Monday Reduce Stress, Increase Flow
Tuesday Understand Pain
Wednesday Stop Reliving Emotions
Thursday Develop Parasympathetic Breathing, Vision, Exercise and Thinking
Friday Improve Digestion and Nutrient Absorption
If you are anxious, depressed or chronically ill, please don’t be discouraged about where you are; learn to be encouraged about where you are going. The power of intention is very strong. You may open a book like this and think that you have no hope of changing. Your thought creates an intention that you will not change, though, so try to be open to change; at a minimum, try to reserve your opinion. Thinking is so often judging and judging is so often negative. It holds us captive. To change this, whenever I catch myself judging, I imagine a green heart outline around the thing or person that I’ve harmed through my thoughts so I can see them in a kinder way.
If you find yourself impatient, anxious or blue, remember that this is a sign that your left brain is kicking in. It’s a sign that you’ve got an expectation-—because it is only with expectation and judgment that we or others in our life fall short. It’s never okay to accept an abusive situation, but as long as I know I am safe and loved, I find it helpful to learn to accept what is—-and find the love for what is through my struggles and doubts. I walk in nature or use a diluted essential oil like pine or eucalyptus to bring me back to expansion, hope and mental calm. I often meditate at these times. Prayer works well, if you are open to it. Feel yourself letting stress melt away. Then loop back to the beginning, to the intention of where you’re going. However much you’ve strayed from the path, accept what is. Think kind and loving thoughts about yourself for trying. You’ll grow your ability to stay on the path by checking in with intention frequently. Always remember though, that this is a journey. We aren’t expected to be perfect, just that we try to make progress.
I was, am, and expect to be challenged every day of my life for as long as I am growing. I choose to grow despite the fear of pushing through. This is because I’ve learned that if I give up, disease, pain, despair and hopelessness await. I’ve been there and I don’t want to go back. Now my destination is health, well-being, happiness, expansion and joy.
I hope that seeing what has worked for me can help you have your best health and happiest life yet.
Love,
Elizabeth
Chapter 1
How Chronic Stress Kills
Outer Chronic Stress
We likely think of stress as being a bad thing and that chronic stress is even worse. Stress is any situation that motivates us to act or change, and as such, it can be neutral, good or bad. Hunger is an example of a stress and feeding ourselves the right amount of healthy food is a good outcome.
Outer chronic stress is when we have the motivation to act or change our environment but for some reason we feel unable to do so; whether it is because of external conditions in our lives, like being repressed in some way during our childhood years, or needing to keep our job in order to pay our mortgage.
Inner Chronic Stress
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves with negative self-talk and how we think about ourselves. This is inner chronic stress. Inner chronic stress can be the most insidious because we often believe that without constantly pushing ourselves we will be lazy or useless and amount to nothing. So many of us have a streak of perfectionism that constantly beats up our inner child; our unconscious self.
We harangue and berate ourselves at times in order to win the love and approval of our parents, teachers and friends, and it can become a habit because it seems to have worked in the past. Because it is self-generated, it is easily turned around, however we have to learn to listen to how we speak to ourselves:
“I’m such an idiot!”
“Dad was right; I’m a failure”
“I’ll never lose this weight!”
I believe that we need to understand that most children are born eager to please. If children are given love and positive encouragement along with tools to help with self-discovery and personal growth, they will develop a balance between being true to themselves and their calling, and will also find joy in making others happy.
Children are often taught more by the unconscious teachings of the adults in their lives through nonverbal communications rather than by the verbal. It's said that the majority of communication happens nonverbally. As parents we are often unaware of what we “say” nonverbally. The emotional stress that we feel when our children are up all night with a fever, and then bounce back, while we suffer from lack of sleep, can result in overreaction to our children’s behavior.
Even if we do not overreact visibly, the stress we feel is in our brain state. This helps explain why our kids often start to act out when we are having a bad day. In addition to biochemical cues, I believe they are reacting to the painful feelings from their mirror neurons caused by our own emotional state, and they do not know what to do about it.
Similarly, I think we react to our children’s distress, anger and fear because it is generated within our mirror neurons when we see it in them. How nice it would be to have the skills to reset our emotional state so we do not have to keep reacting to each other in a negative way when we are having a bad day.
Our Unconscious Mind Runs the Show Under our Noses
Our unconscious beliefs are not easy to access but they drive most of our behavior. Most of those patterns and beliefs were formed before we were six-years-old, according to molecular biologists such as Dr. Bruce Lipton of Stanford. I don’t know about you, but I am uncomfortable at the thought that most of my behavior is being run by that childhood self of mine.
Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Test
I first heard about the ACE test in 2015 from an NPR piece. For those who haven’t heard of it, doctors have realized that traumatic events from our childhood increase risk factors for poor health in later life. Things like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction impact us long after our childhoods are over. The likelihood of our having problems with issues as diverse as smoking, drug and alcohol abuse, missing work, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, suicide attempts, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder) and broken bones increases based on how traumatic our childhoods were. As Donna Jackson Nakazawa reports in Childhood Disrupted, “chronic stress leads to dysregulation of our stress hormones, which leads to unregulated inflammation. And inflammation translates into symptoms and disease.” Many other factors go into whether or not we will get sick, but the right hemisphere of the brain doesn’t have a sense of time. Until the emotions from these traumatic events are processed and released, they are stored in our body and we will continue to suffer. I’ve included the ACE test in the back of this book in Appendix I. In addition to answering these questions for yourself, I suggest you think about how your parents would answer these questions, and your grandparents too. Based on recent research reports, I think it has a bearing that I’ll go into later in the book. It’s clear that what we don’t face from our childhoods is contributing to us getting sick, which gave me a great deal of motivation to look back at my early years.
Why I Needed Healing
I was born into a military family during the Vietnam War, while my dad was on active duty in Vietnam. His combat stress translated into PTSD for me. It doesn’t take much to put babies into a freeze state that is easily re-triggered. My unconscious patterns brought nothing but increasing amounts of fear, restriction, isolation, and ultimately pain from Fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia feels like an overloaded circuit board that is about to ignite. To give an example, if my body were a house, it’d be a house with all the lights on, all the appliances running, everything churning, grinding and wearing out. I needed to find help. I had been frozen in a state of chronic stress for over 40 years and I was about to discover the consequences. I needed answers before it was too late.
Medication gave me too many side effects to deal with. I needed to find the root of my problems so I could heal.
You can order Your Best Health by Friday here: